majorarcana

I had a pretty good time at SXSW this year. It’s deeply satisfying to be around so many intelligent, creative people, and well, to get drunk with them. Jeremy Keith made the comment in the How to Rawk SXSW about how he felt he was amongst his tribe at the festival, and that’s certainly the way I felt – just hanging out with so many progressively minded, technically literate, enthusiastic and media-savvy people was a great feeling, and a reward in of itself. I also came up with a brilliantly catchy business-speak way of describing it, but Mark stole it for one of his tweets, so it’s dead to me now.

(At the same panel, Ben Huh asserted that without a doubt, at some point in the festival we would all end up in a strange car with strange people at 4am, to which I thought – bullshit; our hotel was 2 minutes from the conference centre, right in the middle of downtown where all the parties were happening – what possible reason did I have to get in a strange car. Then on the 4am Wednesday morning, I found myself in a strange car with a bunch of strangers. It’s funny how things turn out sometimes).

Anyways, here’s some of the talks I enjoyed:

• The panel Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration was great not just because of the engaging and novel subject matter, but also because I got to ask someone who actually works at NASA a question. If I ever go back in time, I’ve finally done something my eight-year old self would be impressed by.
• Twitter’s Mark Trammell gave a great, inspiring talk in What Can Carl Sagan Teach Us About The Web?, making extensive use of Cosmos to illustrate points about design, engineering and team-working.
• Bruce Lawson and Martin Kliehm demonstrated the awesomeness of HTML5 in HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches. Let’s hurry up and kill Flash, eh? Just shoot it in the head or something. Twice.
• How The Other Half Lives: Touring The Digital Divide – Jessamyn West and Jenny Engstrom gave an interesting talk on their experiences as librarians in rural and urban America, acting both as sometimes the only point of access to the internet for their communities, and as de facto trainers for a generation with no online experience whatsoever. Notes here.
• And I have to mention Memory Matters: How Do Elephants Do It by Mark Channon and Paul Duncan, not only because it was good and entertaining, but because it was a big part of the reason I got to go.

Supposedly, most of these are going to be podcast at some point, but I can’t find them at the moment. All well worth listening to if they do ever appear, however.

Highlights of the year thus far:

• Breaking Bad – discovered through work colleagues, the ongoing saga of a middle-aged chemistry teacher who discovers he has terminal cancer, and with nothing to lose sets up a crystal meth lab, proves to be consistently entertaining and amusing well into its second season, although I’m slightly concerned that the friends who recommended it were pretty insistent it was the ‘wrongest’ thing on television, bigging it up in my head as Chris Morris’s Oz or somesuch, and yet sitting there watching it, all I can think is how utterly reasonable it all seems.
• Not freezing to death during one of January’s many cold snaps. Fucking hell, it’s been cold in the flat though. I hand in my notice next week, which means I should be out of this shithole by mid-April, thank fuck.
• Catching up on As It Occurs To Me, which I completely failed to listen to in the run up to Christmas. Richard Herring as brilliantly puerile as ever. Why won’t people let him be on the telly? I also caught his Hitler Moustache show at the Leicester square theatre last week. I saw a pre-Edinburgh preview last year, which was pretty funny, but this was a much more refined, focused act, with lots of new material. He’s a very funny man.
• In a similarly late to the party vein, I also picked up the first issue of Dodgem Logic. The Moore stuff is predictably essential, Graham Lineham and Josie Long’s contributions are brief but brilliant, with everything else coming across as a bit meh… And yet, whilst there’s a vein of knee-jerk hippy bollocks there, something appeals about the just-throw-everything-at-the-page editorial direction. It’s the sort of thing I feel should be being done better somewhere on the internet, and yet for some reason isn’t. Interesting to see how it develops.
• Saw Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. Not great, but nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be.
• My love of Grant Morrison’s ongoing Bat-saga is unconditional and unfailing, which I’m sure will come as a surprise to no one, so isn’t something I’ll go into here. His new creator-owned series Joe The Barbarian on the other hand, was an unknown quantity as I managed to completely miss all the hype and the interviews. I needn’t have worried of course – the first issue is a slowly paced scene-setter, but sets up the series concept beautifully, with incredibly lush artwork by the previously unknown to me Sean Murphy.
• Booking myself a trip to SXSW in Austin next month. Not that physically booking it was really much of a highlight, but something to look forward to. I used to joke about how I was boycotting America whilst George W. Bush was in power, but I’ve recently realised I did, in fact, boycott America whilst George W. Bush was in power.

I like the way I teased doing essay-length posts in my end of year round up, but have in fact made even less effort, resorting to bullet points rather than full posts. Something else I started doing this year was Project 365 – a photo a day for a year. Well, the loss of my camera lead, coupled with a few drunken nights where I forgot I was supposed to be taking a picture at some point meant I didn’t even make it through January (seems wholly appropriate the dream was born and died in a pub, mind. I only heard about it the day before NYE, chatting to a colleague in a pub, moments before he made off into the night with a stolen clay pot). Looks like my online fail is destined to continue. Thank you for your continued patience.

Hmm. I did promise to say something about my holiday, didn’t I? A post of sorts exists in notebook form, but looking over it, it’s a rather dull effort so I’m probably going to consign it to the ether. The short version is I went walking in the Lake District towards the end of October, and had a very nice time. There’re pictures and everything.

At the start of the year, I had the goal of doing a minimum of a blog post a month, which obviously I didn’t stick to, and then after my personal life imploded I assumed I’d have a lot more time on my hands and thought hey – maybe I can manage two or three a month – but that didn’t happen either. To be honest, I’ve thrown myself into my day job a bit over the last eight months, and haven’t felt I’ve had a lot to write about (although 15 posts is slightly better than what you would have got in the original plan…). I have to rethink what I want to use this place for again, I think. Most of the blogs I’ve followed over the years have abandoned news/links/micro-posts because there are better outlets for that sort of thing now. The trend seems to be for longer essays, which of course takes time and effort. And if I was going to go down that route, I’d like to do something that might actually be of interest to anyone apart from immediate friends and family – as I’ve pretty much done everything a blogger could do to drive casual traffic away from this site over the last few years, it might be nice to come up with something that might conceivably attract an audience for a change. Less prattling about meeeeeeee next year whatever happens, I reckon.

Creatively, as ever, I need to get more writing done. I’m also getting a bit hacked off with stuff I actually make the effort to finish and place ending up with publications that subsequently crash or disappear without trace. I’m hardly prolific, and the fact the one or two pieces I’m proudest of have effectively been in limbo – in some cases for years – is pretty sickening. I recently found out my major completed project of last year, for a book that was supposed to be out last January, probably now isn’t going to be in the book at all, and will likely end up as a promotional pdf. All very demoralising, and I certainly need to rethink my focus next year.

I’d thought about doing a separate best of the year post, but I think I’ll just blurt it all out here: Book: Bad Vibes, Music: St Vincent – Actor, Film: Moon, TV: Err, The Inbetweeners? Was that this year? It was for me, Comic: Batman: RIP – fuck you internet, I loved it.

See you next year, unless I get chatty between now and new year. Have a good one.

A few weekends ago, I made the trip up North to become Godparent to my nephew. Fortunately, my brother and his wife don’t take the massive responsibilities they’ve asked me to accept too seriously, so mainly this meant going into a Church for an hour and then onto an afternoon do at a local public house, where said nephew regularly admonished me for spending too much time at the bar and not enough time at his party. I’m pleased to report he’s developed a keen fascination with trains, and can now readily discern between an electrically powered Pendelino and a regular diesel train (both pass through his local station regularly). Whilst there is something impressive about the speed of the Pendelino trains that run up and down that west coast line, not to mention the engineering that allows them to do it, I hope he doesn’t become too disillusioned when he travels on one and finds they’re hideously cramped, uncomfortable, and always ludicrously overbooked coming out of London. Branson, if you allow that to happen to my young charge, they’ll be Hell to pay.

After the main party I continued drinking in town with my brother and Terry Christian, which was unexpected, where they attempted to convince me Bramhall, Cheshire was a better place to be single than London.

Meanwhile, been to the cinema recently:

Moon – reservations about how much you’d actually save, economically speaking, by establishing the kind of set-up that serves as the the film’s premise aside, I really enjoyed Bowie Jnr’s directorial debut. Was pleased the much talked about twist was actually the premise, and that it turned out to be a rather touching, thought-provoking movie about alienation, identity and compassion. A great performance from Sam Rockwell also cements his place as one of the best actors of his generation.

District 9 – This, on the other hand, was just silly and tedious. Tonally it veered all over the place, from humourous to horrific to po-faced cod-meaningful, and never in a particularly entertaining way. I also think if you’re going to make a film about the evils of racism, then making the ‘others’ part of a caste system in which the entirety of the lower-caste act throughout the film exactly as the human racists describe them as acting, probably isn’t a particularly smart decision.

Next: what I did on my holidays

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